Free Iron Angel by Alan Campbell Page B

dusk. She had until sunset to find out if her terrible gamble had worked.
    Carefully, she prised out loose shards of glass from the edges of the pane and arranged them in a line. They would serve as knives—too brittle to meet a Spine sword with, but deadly enough if they were thrown.
    She first selected those shards with the best balance, and wound strips of tapestry around one end to make them easier to handle. This way she made six knives in all, although she doubted she’d get the opportunity to use more than one of them. Her first throw would have to be absolutely accurate. Next she used the chair leg to pound the smaller, less useful shards into a fine powder, which she gathered up into a makeshift pouch. Ironically, her Spine master had taught her the efficacy of using such substances to temporarily blind an opponent. The chair leg itself she set aside to use as a club; if she ever escaped the room, it might be handy for close combat.
    A scream erupted from somewhere overhead.
    Rachel pocketed the throwing knives she’d fashioned, then stood up to look out of the window. The Rookery Spire had been the tallest in the temple, so now it naturally housed the lowest dungeon. The smooth black walls outside would be impossible to climb, but overhead, a clutch of spires—fingers of stone and masonry—extruded like stalactites in a Hollowhill cavern. Beyond this, a black lattice of chains stretched on for miles, all wreathed in red fumes and silhouetted against an angry sky. In places, spikes of orange light punctured the city, and constant dull booming sounds drifted over the abyss, as though the bones of the city were snapping one by one. And in a sense they were, for Deepgate was still crumbling into the pit. Showers of dust and debris rained down from the temple and its surroundings, stirring up clouds of grainy air. Looking down, Rachel saw that the roof of the Rookery Spire had already disappeared, and stonework ended twenty yards below her in ragged chaos.
    A door to Hell lay deep in the abyss below this very city, in the darkness below Ulcis’s palace. The god of chains had warned her of its existence. The things down there would tear you to pieces, he’d said. Had last night’s phantasms found a way through this door? Were they refugees driven from the Maze?
    Or advance scouts?
    Rachel shuddered. The gloom down there was as darkly crimson as a well of blood.
They are making demons for the war to come,
Dill had said in the temple antechamber.
A red veil heralds their coming.
    A sudden, loud creaking sound came from behind her and, with a pang of dread, Rachel turned away from the window. A thin crack had appeared along the interior wall of her cell, just an inch above the edge of the floor, and now five yards long.
    Shit.
    The spire was clearly breaking up.
    A tremor convulsed the room. Broken furniture shifted, settling deeper into the sunken floor that had formerly been a ceiling. The crack widened suddenly to the width of a finger, and shot through another five yards of stonework, instantly doubling in length. Now it stretched along two of the walls.
    Rachel gazed in horror.
    So this is how it was to end for her? She would return to the abyss after all: one more skeleton on Ulcis’s mountain of bones. And Dill, up in the cell above, would join her soon. A profound sense of melancholy struck her. The young angel had never shown signs of growing weary of her failure. But now? How could he forgive her now? She buried her head in her hands, exhausted.
    And she waited.
    Another rumble. The crack opened another inch, tracing a jagged line on a third wall as the mortar between its stonework split.
    A sudden anger gripped Rachel. She rose and jumped up and down on the floor, stamping her weight down, kicking the now useless pile of smashed furniture to one side. Why shouldn’t it be over
now
? Why did she have to sit here and patiently wait for the end to come? Could she not at least be in charge of her own